Liberal Democracy in Crisis with Daron Acemoglu

About this episode

How did American life go off the rails? MIT professor and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu joins Oren on the podcast to talk about the erosion in what he calls “working-class liberalism” and the consequences of its decline. He makes the case that America’s liberal democracy is most threatened not by external forces seeking to replace it but from a misunderstanding of liberalism as a prescriptive rule book rather than a guiding philosophy. He and Oren discuss how this thinking infected immigration policy in the Western world and why Acemoglu sees the error as a “kiss of death” for working-class communities before closing with ways to repair some of the damage done in liberal democracy’s descent. Further reading: • What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoglu.